Concise Beam Readme November 3, 2025 This readme file is for version 4.67 of Concise Beam. Concise Beam is sold and serviced in English through www.ConciseDesignSolutions.com. If you are experiencing a problem with Concise Beam you should ensure that you are using the latest release at, http://www.ConciseDesignSolutions.com/download.php **** IMPORTANT INSTALLATION INFORMATION **** In order for your license key to be remembered between sessions you must choose "Run as Administrator" when running Concise Beam on Windows Vista or later. You can do this by right-clicking on the Concise Beam desktop icon and selecting Properties under the "Shortcut" tab click the "Advanced..." button. In the Advanced Properties dialog click the "Run as Administrator" option. You can also do this by simply right-clicking the Concise Beam desktop icon and selecting "Run as administrator". Note that the above is required even if you are logged into as an administrator. ******************************************** ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE (Potential Crash) Many anti-virus software packages now use a program's "reputation on the web" as an indication of whether a program may be malicious or not. They may prevent a program with no reputation from opening assuming it is malicious until checked further. When they block a program such as Concise Beam it may appear as a crash. After the anti-virus software has checked the program it may automatically rerun it after initially blocking it. Concise Beam is used by a very small niche market and has little evident reputation across the web. Concise Beam is also usually updated monthly or even weekly which limits it's apparent reputation. If you are experiencing crashes on startup you should first turn off your anti-virus software temporarily to see if it resolves the problem. If it does then you will need to add an exclusion to the anti-virus software for Concise Beam. See "KNOWN HARDWARE or SOFTWARE PROBLEMS" below for further steps that can be taken. GETTING STARTED GUIDE Please see the Concise Beam Getting Started Guide for help in using Concise Beam for the first time. You will find information on how to get further help and technical support. The Getting Started Guide is distributed in pdf format (*.pdf). NETWORKING A Concise Beam license key is encoded with the number of purchased users that can use the program concurrently. Concise Beam is to be installed on each machine using the same license key code (not a server installation). When you start Concise Beam it will check across your network (using a peer-to-peer networking scheme) to see how many other people are currently using the program. If that number is fewer than the number of users encoded into the license key code then the program will continue. If you have to see which computers on your network are currently running Concise Beam you can use the SHOWNETUSERS command line option when executing Concise Beam, as in "C:\Program Files (x86)\Concise Beam V4.6>ConciseBeamV4_6.exe" SHOWNETUSERS. It will display the computer name of each running instance. If it shows a computer that doesn't appear to be running Concise then use Task Manager to look for the process or simply reboot it. You will find a shortcut to using this option in the Concise Beam V4.6 program group in the Windows Start Menu labelled "Who's Using Concise Beam". KNOWN HARDWARE or SOFTWARE PROBLEMS If you experience any problems using Concise Beam we recommend that you first ensure that you have the latest updates or service packs for your operating system, as well as the latest driver for your graphics card and printer. We further recommend that you ensure that you do not have any viruses or worms infecting your computer. The above problems have affected some of our users and impacted on the use of Concise Beam. Concise Beam uses a configuration file to control it's behaviour. Under the Concise Beam V4.6 program group in the Windows Start Menu you will find "Concise Beam Configuration File". That will open the configuration file (ConciseBeamSettingsV4_6.ini) in NotePad. The user can make changes to this file to hopefully solve some of the following issues. 1) By default Concise Beam checks for updates when it first starts up. On some systems conflicts with other software may cause a crash. This crash can't be detected or contained by Concise Beam. This crash should occur only once since Concise Beam will automatically turn off update checking to avoid future crashes (unless you turn it on again). Therefore if the program crashes on start-up try it again to see if Concise Beam was able to avoid the problem. You can turn off checking for updates in the Check for Updates dialog under the Help menu. If you still experience a crash you can open the configuration file discussed above. In that file search for "CheckForUpdates=1" and change the 0 to 1. That will prevent Concise Beam from trying to use your Internet connect to check for updates. Save the changed configuration file and try Concise Beam again. 2) Some users may find that the 3D image of the beam becomes partially corrupted when overlaid by other windows or the menus. You can clean up the window by resetting it with the Reset item in the View menu. This is the evergreen tree in the toolbar. This problem is a function of the graphics hardware your computer uses (generally older hardware). If this impedes your use of Concise Beam please let us know at support@concisedesignsolutions.com. 3) Concise Beam makes use of the OpenGL sub-system of Microsoft Windows which is used to draw the 3D image of the beam. Some old video cards have incompatibilities with this Windows sub-system and will not allow Concise Beam to run. Obtaining and installing the latest video drivers from your computer or video card manufacturer has been found to solve the problem in most cases. If you still experience a crash you can open the configuration file discussed above. In that file search for "RenderOpenGLinSoftware". If you find "RenderOpenGLinSoftware=0" change the 0 to a 1. If you find "RenderOpenGLinSoftware=1" change the 1 to a 0. Save the changed configuration file and try Concise Beam again. If you are still experience a crash the after trying the above steps let me know at support@concisedesignsolutions.com. Note that Concise Beam has only been tested on native versions of Microsoft Windows 7 or later. It has not been tested on Windows running within a emulator on another operating system.